The Empire's New Clothes

It's Sunday in the San Fernando Valley, and Hayden Christensen sips a bottomless cup of coffee at a nonironic greasy-spoon diner. The Naugahyde booths are filled with porn-industry workers and Latino families dressed for church. Christensen is wearing a worn-down Toronto Maple Leafs hat and looks proudly Canadian, right down to his unlaced leather boots. More than win Oscars or rule the world, what he would really like to do is be the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs. In high school, he was good at putting the puck in the net, and he was also a top junior tennis player; his Star Wars costar Ewan McGregor was duly impressed with the natural athleticism Christensen brought to the on-set swordsmanship. "He's really fast and he's got all the twirls down," he says. "He's quite extraordinary with his moves and spins. And he puts 110 percent into it. I think he was a baton girl in a past life."

Christensen describes his family as intensely competitive. His brother holds Canadian long-distance-running records, and his sister was a junior world trampoline champion before she took up aerial skiing. As a teenager, Christensen had a brush with the greatest competitor of them all, John McEnroe. The actor was serving as a ball boy at one of his matches during a tournament in Toronto. When McEnroe hit the ball into the net, Christensen overzealously charged to retrieve it while McNasty vented his frustration by smashing the ball. His narrow miss of the kid's dome aired on Canadian television that night, marking Christensen's accidental small-screen debut.

The third of four children, Christensen got into acting by way of familial competitiveness. His elder sister had scored a spot in a Pringles commercial. The 7-year-old Christensen tagged along as she interviewed talent agents, and he ended up being scouted himself. He calls acting "this so-called craft where you pretend to be other people. And when you are 15 or 16 years old and trying to figure out who you are, well, it was something that really caught my interest."

In 2000, Christensen assumed the role of a troubled teenager who is molested by his stepmother in the Fox Family Channel series Higher Ground, which lasted just long enough to put him on Lucas's radar. He flew out to L.A. to audition and bested a field of 400 or so others that is said to have included Leonardo DiCaprio and Ryan Phillippe for the part of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode IIAttack of the Clones. But the actor's first big part came playing a death-tripping Goth kid in the 2001 tearjerker Life as a House. Though the movie's script is pure Mrs. Butterworth's, and though he is made to say stuff like "What's in my pants is none of your fucking business!" and act out autoerotic asphyxiation, such is his skill that Christensen becomes a surprisingly appealing character. He earned a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

Then, rather than lounge around poolside waiting for his agent to deliver the right role, he went out and created his own, becoming a driving force behind Shattered Glass, a biopic about disgraced New Republic reporter Stephen Glass. It was a gutsy move, going from the mall-packing movie event that was Attack of the Clones to the title role in a small-budget indie; from the broad, CGI-assisted strokes of Anakin Skywalker to the creepy depths of Glass, whose professional abuses Christensen smartly undercut by playing him as a fumbling, all-too-likable manipulator. The role convinced Christensen that there was life beyond the Skywalker Rancheven if it fell to him to go find it.

But nothing comes easy. Once the Star Wars saga is complete, Christensen's real challenge begins: trying to escape the Mark Hamill syndromethat is, attempting to leave Star Wars' gravitational pull and build a conventional movie career. "I haven't been dealing with that dilemma thus far," he says. "I'm not really concerned about it, either, though maybe I should be, given how many times I'm asked about it."

He shouldn't be overly worried. Soon he'll be working on The Decameron with The OC 's Mischa Barton and starring in Barry Levinson's Sixty-six, which will close out the director's Baltimore cycle. He also has assembled a crew of people he trusts to run his production company, Forest Park Pictures, not simply the vanity confection many young stars attach their names to but an actual creative enterprise that's currently developing an actual TV series he can't actually talk about.

At last, there's room for that. "There's a bittersweet sense of relief," Christensen says of finally putting the monumental mixed blessing of Star Wars behind him. "But very much one of relief. Star Wars has been a huge commitment for me. It will definitely free up a lot of time."